Real-world design experience drives demand for environmental engineering class

At registration time, Benito Mariñas’ environmental lab course fills up with lightning speed. Ever since Mariñas redesigned CEE449 Environmental Engineering Laboratory to include a design project related to water treatment in Mexico, complete with an optional trip there, students have flocked to the course.

Their enthusiasm is evidence of the strong desire of today’s students to work internationally and use their engineering degrees to make a real difference in the world, explained Mariñas, the Ivan Racheff Professor of Environmental Engineering.
 
"It used to be that undergrads just wanted to become practicing engineers, get a good job, and make money," Mariñas remarked. "Now all of our top students want to be involved in solving the problems of the world."

The course is designed to teach laboratory methods to senior undergraduates, but as Mariñas teaches the class, it does that and more. Mariñas collaborates with the Universidad de Las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), located in Cholula in the State of Puebla, Mexico. The course is co-taught via web with two UDLAP faculty members and includes their CEE undergraduate students. The Mexican university helps identify projects, provides laboratory space, and offers critical site-specific technical, socio-economic and cultural information. Students take on an actual project in an impoverished rural community in Mexico and work to find a sustainable solution for safe drinking water.

The first project, in spring of 2008, was conducted in the small, isolated community of Los Llanos in 2008, where students helped design a sustainable water supply for the approximately 100 residents. In spring 2011, the fourth time the class will be taught, students will continue work on a project that began in 2010, the development of sustainable approaches for water resources management in several Mixteca Oaxaqueña communities near Nochixtlan in the State of Oaxaca.
 
All Illinois team members are invited to participate in one of two trips to Mexico, each one week long and provided at no cost to students, thanks to sponsorship by CEE at Illinois, the College of Engineering’s International Programs in Engineering office, and the National Science Foundation-sponsored Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems (WaterCAMPWS). The trips enable joint design sessions with UDLAP students and field trips to target communities, during which students gather information and water samples.
 
Finding a solution to a real-world problem requires a multidisciplinary approach, which Mariñas says is made possible by affiliation with the WaterCAMPWS. Consultations with experts from other fields—like Illinois professors Joanna Shisler, a microbiologist, and Michael Plewa, a toxicologist and geneticist—are critical when dealing with the complex issues surrounding water disinfection.
 
"We think we know everything, but we don’t," Mariñas says. "One of the problems in civil and environmental engineering is that anytime you solve a problem, there is a chance that you are creating an unintended consequence."
 
Another real-world element of the course is the team approach. Students are organized into teams of 10, which are led by advanced PhD students whom Mariñas recruits to participate in the class as team leaders with co-leaders from UDLAP. The various tasks of the design project are assigned to small groups of two or three students. For some students, learning to act as a member of a team, in which outcomes are more important than personal achievement, is a difficult adjustment, Mariñas says, but meeting that challenge is essential both to the success of the project and to the student’s professional future.
 
"In a consulting company, you are going to be part of a team," he said. "If you act only solo, you are not going to be liked by your colleagues, and if your colleagues don’t like you, you are not going to succeed."
 
The course has been greeted with such enthusiasm by CEE students that Mariñas is working to develop collaborative relationships with several universities in East Africa, with the goal of doing future class projects there. He is working on a plan for a new research center, Global Safe Water, which would facilitate the kind of multidisciplinary collaborations that make such projects possible. Bringing students to Africa poses greater challenges than travel to Mexico, but Mariñas sees immeasurable educational value in exposing students to an area that presents one of the world’s most pressing water-related engineering challenges.
 
"The places that really need this, where most people are dying because of lack of access to clean water and lack of access to sanitation, are in sub-Saharan Africa," he noted.
 
Theresa Vonder Haar and Aimee Gall are environmental engineering graduate students who have been involved with CEE449. Both say they chose Illinois for graduate school in large part because of the opportunity to do international research in water disinfection with Mariñas. They are undecided about their exact career plans, except for one detail: the desire to work in developing countries. According to Mariñas, it is a sentiment shared by many of today’s environmental engineering students.
 
"I’m not the one initiating this; our students are demanding this," he said.
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Contact: Benito J. Mariñas, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/333-6961.

Writer: Celeste Arbogast Bragorgos, director of communications, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/333-6955.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.